91 posts from June 2014

Monday, June 30, 2014

I'll be pretty tied up today in meetings and then going to the Hunt Club Aquatic Center in Gurnee for a remote broadcast with Bill Leff and Wendy Snyder on WGN-AM 720 from 3 - 5:30 p.m., but it's going to be a day of big decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court:

1. The closely-watched "Hobby Lobby case" in which the Court will decide whether constitutional guarantees of religious freedom gives private employers the right to deny employees otherwise mandatory birth-control coverage in their health-insurance plans.

I have two advance thoughts on this. One is that, since the attempt to to mandate the provision of "free" birth control to all, we should cut out the middle man (insurance industry) and directly provide birth control devices and measures to all who want them without chare. Two is that this is yet another illustration of why the health-insurance/employer link ought to be broken,

Whether a state may, consistent with the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, compel personal care providers to accept and financially support a private organization as their exclusive representative to petition the state for greater reimbursements from its Medicaid programs.

I have one thought about this: You can't have a union that allows "right to work" freeloading on union deals, so an adverse ruling to unions here, unless very narrowly crafted, will be a huge blow to public-sector unions.

The court ruled that the state of Illinois cannot make the particular class of workers at issue in the case pay a representation fee to labor unions, but declined to explicitly overrule previous precedents that had upheld representation fees for public school teachers and other direct employees of state or municipal governments. The decision will hurt public sector union finances and membership, and close off one of the few promising avenues for union growth, but leaves most existing public sector workers' unions untouched.

Hobby Lobby wins, but in a flurry of opinions that seems to narrow the impact of the decision somewhat.

Saturday, June 28, 2014

Now that the Dixmoor Five case is in the news again, Gov. Pat Quinn has a great opportunity to take care of some unfinished business on his desk.

The Dixmoor Five were teenagers when they were railroaded into prison for the 1991 rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl in the south suburb. The case against them fell apart March, 2011, when DNA evidence found on the victim was matched to a convicted rapist who had been living near the victim's home at the time of the murder.

Those members of the Dixmoor Five who were still imprisoned were released. And in October, 2012, they collectively filed a federal lawsuit against state and local law enforcement officials alleging that police concealed or ignored evidence that pointed to the real killer and coerced false confessions from two of them.

Last week came the announcement that the Illinois State Police settled with the five men for $40 million — a record payout in a wrongful conviction case. That's your money, taxpayers, going yet again to paper over the sins of bunglers in our justice system (which I mention in the event you're not sufficiently outraged by the idea of five innocent people spending a total of more than 75 years in prison).

The re-emergence of this story should remind Quinn that it's well past time for him to act on a related pardon request from one of the former defendants, a request that's been sitting on his desk for nearly two years.

In January, 1997, Robert Taylor, one of the Five, was a frightened 19-year-old on trial for a murder that occurred shortly after he'd turned 14; a murder he knew he didn't commit. Sensing the case was going badly, he skipped out on his bond and went into hiding just before closing arguments were to begin.

He was convicted in absentia of murder, then arrested at a friend's house two months later. He pleaded guilty that summer to violating his bond, a felony conviction that remains on his record even though, in hindsight, of course, the bond was related to a bogus charge.

So even though Taylor has been formally exonerated on the murder charge — Cook County Circuit Judge Michael McHale granted him a certificate of innocence in March, 2012 — he's still a convicted felon in the eyes of the law.

Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez filed in opposition when Taylor, now 36, sought a pardon on the bond-jumping conviction from the Illinois Prisoner Review Board in the summer of 2012.

"Whether or not (Taylor) committed the offenses that he was on bond for is immaterial," said Alvarez's letter. "(He) contends that his behavior should be excused because he was innocent of the charges and scared. Granting (him) a pardon under such circumstances would create a dangerous precedent for all other defendants in the criminal justice system. Future defendants who are free on bond would surely take the granting of clemency to (Taylor) as a signal that they are entitled to do the same thing."

Surely? No. Surely it's the job of the governor to see through this kind of pettifoggery and recognize that Taylor's outstanding conviction is the direct result of the same sort of churlish stubbornness that the Cook County state's attorney's office continues to display here.

The Prisoner Review Board long ago passed its confidential recommendation on Taylor's petition to Gov. Quinn. This landmark settlement — further evidence of the scope of the ghastly wrongs done to the Dixmoor Five — tugs on his sleeve.

Chicago Newsroom CAN TV: Ken Davis is joined by Tom McNamee (Chicago Sun-Times) and Kristen McQueary (Chicago Tribune). They discuss yesterday's Supreme Court decision requiring police to secure warrants to search the cellphones of people they arrest, the legacy of former Mayor Jane Byrne, and CPS revisions to the Student Code of Conduct. You may subscribe to the audio version of the Chicago Newsroom podcast on iTunes

Whoops! Time to reset my "Days Without a Major Court Decision Upholding Gay Marriage" calendar.

The number was 19 — the days that had elapsed since a federal judge in the Western District of Wisconsin struck down that state's same-sex marriage ban — before Wednesday, after a federal circuit court issued a ruling against a same-sex marriage ban that impacted Utah, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico and Wyoming and a federal judge in the Southern District of Indiana ruled that state's ban on gay nuptials unconstitutional.

Before Wisconsin the number was 17 (since Pennsylvania), 1 (Oregon), 6 (Idaho), 4 (Arkansas) and you get the idea. Who can doubt that the The Big Reset — the day I can throw my calendar away because the issue will be completely settled — is less than a year away?

Friday, June 27, 2014

Rick Pearson reports that the "group pushing a constitutional amendment to create a more independent way to draw legislative districts pulled the plug on the effort today, hours after a Cook County judge tossed the proposal from the Nov. 4 ballot."

That same jurist, Cook County Judge Mary Mikva, also bounced a citizen initiated referendum proposal to impose term limits on state legislators. The reason in both cases was the same -- the proposals are outside the narrow definition of proper subjects for citizen-initiated referendum in the state constitution -- and I've been warning readers about this for months:

The best chance that Team Term Limits have is that a new Illinois Supreme Court majority will decide that the rather plain language of the constitution doesn't mean what it says or that the imposition of term limits causes a structural and procedural change in legislative processes, meaning they will have to decide that "structural" and "procedural" have meanings outside our common understanding.

Anything's possible in Illinois, I guess, and I wish it weren't so -- this is the kind of question voters should be allowed to decide -- but it really is so.

Frisby v. Schultz (1988) — which is relatively uncontroversial on the Court today — held that a ban on targeted residential picketing was content-based, based partly on the government interest to preserve residential privacy; and that interest was closely tied to shielding people from unwelcome speech. “One important aspect of residential privacy,” the Frisby majority (which included Justice Scalia) said, “is protection of the unwilling listener. Although in many locations, we expect individuals simply to avoid speech they do not want to hear, the home is different. … [W]e have repeatedly held that individuals are not required to welcome unwanted speech into their own homes and that the government may protect this freedom.”.....Frisby‘s conclusion that a law may be content-neutral even when it is aimed at shielding “unwilling listener[s]” against “unwanted speech” would apply to speech more generally, not just to speech outside homes.

Chief Justice Roberts suggested that a proper response to hurtful protests is general laws creating buffer zones around funerals and the like... Maryland, where the protest took place, now has such a law, as do, the chief justice said, 43 other states and the federal government. In his dissent, Justice Alito said such laws offer insufficient protection.

UPDATE: Ed Yohnka of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, sent along this note:

Earlier this session, the Court dismissed a case brought by the ACLU, which challenged the practice of the Secret Service that permitted (specifically in the Bush Cheney years) people to be banned from presidential and vice presidential events if they were perceived to have policy differences with the administration. In one instance we saw, someone with an anti-war sticker on their car was denied entry to an event where Mr. Cheney was speaking. The ACLU case was dismissed on the grounds that the officials involved had qualified immunity.

But if you pull these two cases together, you see that the Court was ready to insure that a President of the United States, protected by a well-armed Secret Service, is entitled NOT to be confronted by an audience that disagrees with his (thus far) choices, but a young, vulnerable woman is not offered the same protection.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

Anti-abortion activist Nancy Clark of Worcester, Mass., estimated in court testimony that “only 1 woman in 100” entering an abortion clinic was willing to walk across the street to hear her out after passage of a state law in 2007 that placed her and her fellow “sidewalk counselors” at the limits of a 35-foot buffer zone outside clinics.

Clark and six other plaintiffs sued Massachusetts claiming the buffer zone infringed on their First Amendment rights, and on Thursday the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in their favor.

“While the First Amendment does not guarantee a speaker the right to any particular form of expression, some forms — such as normal conversation and leafleting on a public sidewalk — have historically been more closely associated with the transmissions of ideas than others,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts for the court.

The “petitioners are not protesters,” Roberts wrote. “They seek not merely to express their opposition to abortion but to inform women of various alternatives and to provide help in pursuing them. (They) believe that they can accomplish this objective only through personal, caring, consensual conversations.”

Put a pin on that word “consensual.” I’ll get back to it.

Roberts went on, “If all that the women can see and hear are vociferous opponents of abortion, then the buffer zones have effectively stifled petitioners’ message.”

This is an expansive reading indeed of the simple constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech, suggesting that speakers not only get to have their choice of topic and public venue but also modality. Unless speakers may employ their preferred method of interaction — leaflet, sign, chant, harangue or quiet chitchat — their expression is presumed to have been stifled.

You might wonder how this squares with the creation and enforcement of the far more stifling “free-speech zones,” sometimes literally pens made of chain-link fence, for protesters at the outskirts of political conventions. Or with the laws that ban any form of campaign speech within a certain distance — usually 100 feet — of the entrance to polling places. Or the law that prohibits protesting on the plaza outside the Supreme Court building itself (see image below).

2. Supreme Court rules against Obama over appointment power In a ruling that will constrain future presidents, the court held on a 9-0 vote that the three appointments (President Barack) Obama made to the U.S. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in 2012 were unlawful. The decision limits the ability of presidents to make so-called recess appointments without Senate approval, although the court did not go as far as it could have gone in restricting a president's powers.

I haven't read the opinions but my very quick takes are that freedom from harassment on the public way is, if not a right then at least an important value, and that preventing protesters of any sort from getting up in a person's face when that person doesn't want to hear their message does not meaningfully impinge on the freedom of those protesters to express their views in a fashion that can be heard and accessed by any and all who want to listen. I wonder how this decision would have gone if the protesters had been gun control activists who wanted to "counsel" those attempting to walk into stores that sell firearms by shaming them and shaking photos of ventilated corpses at them.

I've never liked the recess appointment dodge -- it exploits a provision written for a vastly different time in our history when travel was difficult, the Senate was out of session for months at a time and presidents needed to be able to act. The use of it by Obama and other modern presidents to avoid the Senate's advise-and-consent role has been just as disquieting as the way the Senate has abused the appointment process to block perfectly sound nominees for reasons having nothing to do with their qualificiations.

McDonald’s is testing a new mobile app that lets customers order their favorite McFoods on their phones.

The “McDonald’s Mobile Ordering" app asks burger and fry aficionados to register with email addresses and credit or debit card information before they compose orders and drive to curbside check-in spots outside the store, or walk inside. The app is free to download on Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating systems.

Alas, the test is in Georgia and Alabama at just 22 locations. Any predictions on when we'll see this rolled out nationwide? I say September, 2015.

This link is to a Paul Krugman column touting the successes of President Obama. Don't click if you don't want to read it, but if you do click, let me know if works for you (if you are not a Tribune digital subscriber who is logged in). Just curious.

An occasional listing of intriguing, wacky, useful, provocative and otherwise interesting links that readers and I have come across and think you might want to see.

How Wrong You Are allows visitors to match wits against the public and the truth itself. I got six questions wrong before guessing correctly on this one (right)

"From a cyclist's perspective, intersections are basically death traps, where right-turning drivers threaten collisions at any moment," writes Colin Schultz at Smithsonian. Could redesigned lanes solve the problem?

No wonder those "redskins" are so touchy! "Between 1776 and 1887, the United States seized over 1.5 billion acres from America's indigenous people by treaty and executive order. Explore how in this interactive map of every Native American land cession during that period."

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

The Detroit News will no longer use the team’s nickname, “Redskins,” in routine football coverage, reflecting the growing view that the term is offensive to many Americans...For our platforms, use Washington football team on first reference, except Washington (alone) is acceptable if the reference to the NFL team is clear. On second and subsequent references, use Washington where the context will make it clear to our readers we’re talking about the NFL team. It is acceptable to use the Washington Redskins identification in items that refer to the naming controversy.

Justice Harry Blackmun wrote the opinion, with Justice Thurgood Marshall, Justice John Paul Stevens and Justice William Rehnquist concurring.

It may be tempting, as, in my view, the (majority) today is tempted, to stretch the doctrine of fair use so as to permit unfettered use of this new technology in order to increase access to television programming.

But such an extension risks eroding the very basis of copyright law, by depriving authors of control over their works and consequently of their incentive to create....

Ald. Edward Burke, 14th, proposed naming the international terminal at O'Hare International Airport, the grand ballroom at Navy Pier or the plaza surrounding Buckingham Fountain after (Jane) Byrne, who served as mayor from 1979 to 1983.

The plaza around the fountain seems fairly weak. Airport terminals should have -- and will always be known by -- their numbers, not their names. Throwing Byrne's name onto "International Terminal; Terminal 5" would not be a lasting or commonly used honor.

At least the idea of renaming the "spaghetti bowl" intersection for her no longer seems to have currency.

Your ideas? Serious ones, I mean. What about a beach? Or a medium-sized street? A park?

Why do we like the sports we like? What is it we don't like about the sports we do like? It often feels to me as elusive a topic as musical taste. You can pick it apart all day long, but at the end of the day, something either grabs you or it doesn't.

Any activity, any genre, can be reduced to its most mundane elements and then ridiculed. Believe me, as a fan of traditional square dancing,country music and gofl I'm well acquainted with how mockery works.

So the critique of soccer--

Teams of players run around a huge field for a couple of hours more or less, kicking a ball around and trying with vanishingly rare success to kick it into one goal or other other.

-- can be tweaked into a critique of golf --

Players in dress pants whack glorfied sticks at little white balls and try to see who can use the fewest whacks to get the balls in a series of holes

or hockey or baseball or football.

Is it familiarity with the intriciacies of the game? With the players themselves? The degree of difficulty of the performance on the field?

Yes to all these things, and more.

You think you could never get excited about watching cricket -- which is, in my extremely limited viewing experience, the single most tedious major team sport in the whole wide world -- but given the right set of circumstances, you almost certainly could. This is the insight that shapes the "up close and personal" TV coverage of the Olympic games. You don't care which person in the world can most quickly slide down a mountian on tricked-out barrel staves until NBC makes you care through back-story and technical analysis.

John Kass this morning clams that our current elevated interest in soccer during the World Cup is "worrying the old established sports," but, like his April 2013 prediction that "football in America won't last another 10 years," I believe he is wrong.

Sports fans have lots of attention to spread around and as much more love to give as parents of three who are expecting their fourth child. What will drive away paying customers, however, will be fan abuse -- soaring ticket prices and tedious accommodations to television.

The Ann Arbor Chronicle's John U. Bacon sums up this situation well in a recent commentary related to MIchigan football but widely applicable:

Everybody’s most hated delay is waiting for TV timeouts to end. Because every game is televised, ticket holders endure about 20 commercial breaks per game, plus halftime. That adds up to more than 30 minutes of TV timeouts – about three times more than the 11 minutes the ball is actually in play.

To loyal fans who sit in a stadium that is too hot in September and too cold in November – and often too rainy in between – this is as galling as taking the time, money, and effort to drive downtown to a local store, only to have to wait while the clerk talks on the phone with someone who didn’t bother to do any of those things.

Why do the powers that be let TV spoil your day at the stadium? TV doesn’t stop car races, golf tournaments or soccer games – yet those still make millions of dollars for all involved. If the TV whizzes can’t figure out how to make a buck on football without ruining the experience for paying customers, those fans will figure it out for themselves, and stay home.

Meanwhile, hurray for Michelle Wie. I wonder if, now that she's won a major, she'll become the dominant player many people thought she'd become when she was a long-hitting adolescent.

I do vote no on her putting stance (right), though. I don't like it when golfers have putters that go up to their bellies, and I don't like it when they bring their bellies to their putters.

I believe you know the drill by now. When you indicate your favorites among these semi-finalists, in comments, please allude briefly to the content of substance of the tweet in order to facilitate the conversation.

Come back tomorrow to click vote on the finalists.

*She tweets to me that she's been told this joke is very close to a "Calvin and Hobbes" joke in the `90s.

(The U.S. Supreme Court) came within one vote of declaring the VCR contra band 30 years ago ... The dissent in that case was driven in part by the plaintiffs’ prediction that VCR technology would wreak all manner of havoc in the television and movie industries (arguing that VCRs “directly threatened” the bottom line of “[e]very broadcaster”).

The Networks make similarly dire predictions about Aereo. We are told that nothing less than “the very existence of broadcast television as we know it” is at stake. Aereo and its amici dispute those forecasts and make a few of their own, suggesting that a decision in the Networks’ favor will stifle technological innovation and imperil billions of dollars of investments in cloud-storage services.... Justice Antonin Scalia, dissenting from today's 6-3 ruling that went against the online TV service Aereo, Inc. (story)

Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are right. Never thought I'd write that sentence. This is a ruling that throws a wrench into the gears of progress in the name of protecting previously enshired prerogatives. The broadcasters who fought so hard against Aereo have, after all, squatters' rights on great hunks of the public airwaves. Rent free.

Aereo helped give the public better, less fettered access to that which they disseminate on those airwaves. And rather than seeing the merit and the potential in that, the broadcasters squashed the technology with the help of the court.

Just remember, as Scalia points out, they tried to squash the VCR (now DVR) as well. And almost succeeded.

About "Change of Subject."

"Change of Subject" by Chicago Tribune op-ed columnist Eric Zorn contains observations, reports, tips, referrals and tirades, though not necessarily in that order. Links will tend to expire, so seize the day. For an archive of Zorn's latest Tribune columns click here. An explanation of the title of this blog is here. If you have other questions, suggestions or comments, send e-mail to ericzorn at gmail.com.
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Contributing editor Jessica Reynolds is a 2012 graduate of Loyola University Chicago and is the coordinator of the Tribune's editorial board. She can be reached at jreynolds at tribune.com.